X-Cart forums

[intel352]

Originally Posted by fhiremark

I have a couple of questions though:

1) I saw mentioned in this thread an issue about duplicate content, and I'm wondering if this mod addresses that issue, or if it will sometime down the road.

2) I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the mod, but it almost feels as if the site slows down by a second or so. -- I don't know if others are having this issue, or it's just me, but I just wanted to throw it out there.

3) I haven't played around with froogle yet because I'm afraid I'll screw up something, but is the froogle option on this mod working properly?

4) Is it safe to go live with this mod? I'm probably going live this monday and it'll be a big plus if I can safely implement this.

Overall, this is a great mod intel --Thanks!

1. Duplicate content isn't confirmed yet, but this mod currently does it's best to produce consistent URLs, and will redirect to the "proper" url as needed (say, if the url was mangled, but if the SEO mod can determine what the intended URL was, it'll do a 301 redirect). The duplicate content concern is regarding the variables at the end of URLs. Variables are currently left untouched when possible, but this may change in the next release, to reduce duplicate content fears.

2. Slowdown is quite possible. I believe there is a page load mod somewhere, if you want to do some benchmarks with XC SEO disabled and enabled to see how much of a difference occurs, that would be appreciated. I'm always working on rewriting the algorithms, so if I can find a way to speed it up further, rest assured, I'll do it

3. Froogle is working properly with this mod. To test Froogle, enable the Module in the Module Administration, then go to the Export page, and do a Froogle Export. That creates a froogle text file on your server. Then click Download, so you can view the Froogle export on your PC to verify the urls created by XC SEO. Worked great in my test. If you click on Upload, that's supposed to send to Google I believe

4. I believe the mod could be safely used, but if I were you, I would usertest it with friends and family, to have them find any issues if possible. BTW, just for fun, try mangling one of your category SEO'd urls if you mangle the category name in the url by 5 characters or less, XC SEO should still find the correct category for you


One important note, if a url cannot be found, a 404 error is produced. The text that is generated was a temporary placeholder, I'd suggest you change it before going live. If you search include/class.xcart_seo.php for "404", you should find the html that I'm referencing.
This should be changed in the next release as well.

Additionally, if you do go live with base X-Cart, and add the mod later, your URLs should still work, and will just 301 redirect as needed.

Cheers, and thanks for the kinds words regarding the mod, it's always good to get some feedback

[intel352]

btw fhiremark, you said the product urls were long and looked funny towards the end. would you mind posting an example url, and how you would prefer it to look?

i'm always up for adding more features or reworking the code as needed, so please post any requests or suggestion!

[fhiremark]

Thanks for the detailed response intel, cleared up alot of stuff for me.

I'll try to find the mod to test the speed and I'll get back to you with the results.

You also mentioned how the links turned out for me, so here's one of my examples:
http://www.sitenotyetactive.com/hobbies-and-fun/arts-and-crafts/crochet_p2205.html?cat=51&page=1

The above is fine, but ideally it'll be best if they can turn out like this:
http://www.sitenotyetactive.com/hobbies-and-fun/arts-and-crafts/crochet.html

But I do have to say that all my first level and second level category links are perfect the way they are, for example:
http://www.sitenotyetactive.com/hobbies-and-fun/
http://www.sitenotyetactive.com/hobbies-and-fun/arts-and-crafts/

And those were generated with the category names: "Hobbies & Fun" and "Arts & Crafts"

Just to throw out ideas, what do people think about eliminating the "and" altogether? and just have like "/hobbies-fun" and "/arts-crafts" --personally I think the "and" makes it easier for the user to read, but on the flip side, the links would be shorter, and that's a plus too.

[intel352]

Your idea about removing the "and" is a future feature (removing "stopwords"). It will be a toggle though, because I prefer to have a proper phrase in the url. If you remove stopwords like a, and, the, then the category and product names might not make sense. I'm doing this mostly for user experience

A few things that I might do to clean up the URL a bit, is:
1. Remove "default" variables (cat isn't needed, and page=1 is a default, so the page variable would not display unless it was a value other than 1)

2. Eventually I'll move to storing SEO'd URLs in the database, that might improve the overall speed some, and it should allow us to get rid of the _p1234 bit.

Thanks for the feedback

[wertzwerth]

Intel-

Just wanted to say MUCH THANKS for your diligence and generocity in developing this mod for everyone here. I'm very eager to implement the finished mod on our live store, I just wish I were capable of providing more constructive feedback to you before then--but you've definitely got my gratitude! All the best!

[alru111]

Originally Posted by intel352

that's correct, that one setting will completely disable the mod

.htaccess still remains in effect


nice mod man

[alru111]

It would be nice to make subcategory listings home.php?cat=??? look
like this http://www.mysite.com/cat/subcat.html
instead of http://www.mysite.com/cat/subcat/


I am also using quite a few subcategories and the resulting url is way too long. Do you think there is a way to customize a number of subdirectories that are put in the url

http://mysite.com/cat/subcat/product.html
instead of
http://mysite.com/cat/subcat1/subcat2/subcat3/product.html

[alru111]

here is how seo optimization is done for phpbb
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

I hope you will find it useful for this mod

[intel352]

Originally Posted by alru111

.htaccess still remains in effect


nice mod man

Good point, thanks

as for subcats as .html pages, and less categories shown, how about the top level category and the subcat that the product is in?

so:
http://mysite.com/cat/subcat1/subcat2/subcat3/product.html

would become:
http://mysite.com/cat/subcat3/product.html

[alru111]

I can't say what subcategory has more relevance in each particular case, for me it's the last before the product, but in for some it might be the first one.

Can it be customizable?


Another thing I noticed when installed the mod that images with relative paths that are not implemented through {$ImagesDir} disappeared.